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(1978). Negative criticism: Its swath of destruction and what to do about it.
"It is a little after midnight. You have just come out of the last show at the movie. To save a block you cut through a dark alley. Halfway through it—just as you are beginning to relax—two men step out of the shadows. You hear a nasty metallic snick and suddenly there is the glint of knife blades in the feeble light.
What would you do?
I know what I would do.
Quickly I'd turn and throw a fearful look back up the alley. It is clear and free. A surge of adrenalin sends the blood pumping to my legs. Getting out of that alley I set a new indoor Olympic sprint record. The jogger in me has never seen such speed. Nothing seems sweeter than the glare of street lights and the chatter of people making their way to their cars. I look for a police officer and tell my story.
That is what everybody would do in such a situation, right?
But let me play you another version. The scene is the same. The two hulking men are coming at you with knives. But you keep strolling casually on to meet them. You throw up your arms and say, 'I'm all yours. Let me feel the steel. I know it will help me in the long run.'
They oblige by savagely thrusting the knives deep into your defenseless belly. You fall to the pavement writhing with pain. The men stand over you. You roll onto your stomach and gasp, 'You'd better give me a couple in the back, too.'
Ridiculous?
Of course, but it is exactly what thousands upon thousands of us do each and every day by failing to recognize that the knives of negative criticism which people stick in us are just as sharp and deadly as those made of steel and borne by assassins." (p. 9)
What would you do?
I know what I would do.
Quickly I'd turn and throw a fearful look back up the alley. It is clear and free. A surge of adrenalin sends the blood pumping to my legs. Getting out of that alley I set a new indoor Olympic sprint record. The jogger in me has never seen such speed. Nothing seems sweeter than the glare of street lights and the chatter of people making their way to their cars. I look for a police officer and tell my story.
That is what everybody would do in such a situation, right?
But let me play you another version. The scene is the same. The two hulking men are coming at you with knives. But you keep strolling casually on to meet them. You throw up your arms and say, 'I'm all yours. Let me feel the steel. I know it will help me in the long run.'
They oblige by savagely thrusting the knives deep into your defenseless belly. You fall to the pavement writhing with pain. The men stand over you. You roll onto your stomach and gasp, 'You'd better give me a couple in the back, too.'
Ridiculous?
Of course, but it is exactly what thousands upon thousands of us do each and every day by failing to recognize that the knives of negative criticism which people stick in us are just as sharp and deadly as those made of steel and borne by assassins." (p. 9)
(1999). A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear & Distrust at Work.
"In a strict hierarchy, when someone in power has the reputation for retribution, it would be irresponsible to encourage the discussion of dangerous truths. One time I believed a manager's self-description as 'open-minded and empowering.' Introducing dialogue into her group was a mistake. She was not open-minded and had a reputation for shooting the messenger. The result was agony—two hours of people squirming in their seats, eyes darting longingly toward the door, and no one daring to tell the truth." (p. 194)
(1998). Critical SHIFT: The Future of Quality in Organizational Performance.
"Sometimes the search for a position in your organization that matches your desires leaves you empty-handed. In this situation you must make the decision to leave the organization or stay and create a new position if you believe it will add value. If you decide to stay, do not be deterred by those who tell you it will be impossible to create a new role. Our parents taught us 'Where there's a will, there's a way.' "
(2003). The Geek Syndrome.
Flattened workplace hierarchies are more comfortable for those who find it hard to read social cues. A WYSIWYG world, where respect and rewards are based strictly on merit, is an Asperger's dream.
(1981). Models for Management : The Structure of Competence.
"Chain of command looks good on paper, but in practice it falls far short as an effective system for arousing cooperation when basic economic conditions have resulted in men being released from industrial servitude." (p. 122)
(1984). Scenes from Corporate.
"The men and women who work in middle management and technical jobs in corporations suffer from fear, but not from cowardice. Their ability to endure fear in the struggle to achieve happiness as it has been defined for them proves that they are not cowards. They lack options. They may move from corporation to corporation, but the systems in which they live do not change with the change of employment. As they grow older, even that illusory option disappears. Then they must choose between human alienation and their accustomed standard of living." (p. 284)
(1995). Working Without a Net.
"Self-disclosers explain to others who they are, not just what they do. No one builds relationships unless they reveal more than job-related facts. Contrary to the old paradigm—which held that others don't have the right to know about your personal life—the new paradigm says that it's a necessity that they know." (p. 71)
(1994). Working Without a Net: How to Survive and Thrive in Today's High Risk Business World.
"Self-disclosers explain to others who they are, not just what they do. No one builds relationships unless they reveal more than job-related facts. Contrary to the old paradigm—which held that others don't have the right to know about your personal life—the new paradigm says that it's a necessity that they know." (p. 71)
(1987). Classics of Public Administration.
"The philosophy of management by directive and control—regardless of whether it is hard or soft—is inadequate to motivate because the human needs on which this approach relies are today unimportant motivators of behavior. Direction and control are essentially useless in motivating people whose important needs are social and egoistic. Both the hard and the soft approach fail today because they are simply irrelevant to the situation." (p. 260)
(1990). The Fifth Discipline.
"All too often, teams in business tend to spend their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team's collective strategy—maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team. To keep up the image, they seek to squelch disagreement; people with serious reservations avoid stating them publicly, and joint decisions are watered-down compromises reflecting what everyone can live with, or else reflecting one person's view foisted on the group. If there is disagreement, it's usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions and experience in a way that the team as a whole could learn."
(1994). The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.
"People stay with roles that frustrate them because of the dynamics of the structure. Something about their own lives, relationships, or position makes each person 'right' for the part he plays. It all seems so predetermined, yet the factors that create this may, individually, be quite inconsequential. People may even be drawn into the roles which clash with their personalities. Then, horrifyingly, their personalities may change over time to match the role they have been given." (p. 412)
(1994). What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement.
"It is a disturbing idea that depressed people see reality correctly while nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving way. As a therapist I was trained to believe that it is my job to help a depressed patient to feel both happier and see the world more clearly. I am supposed to be the agent of happiness as well as the agent of truth. But maybe truth and happiness antagonize each other. Perhaps what we have considered good therapy for a depressed patient merely nurtures benign illusions, making the patient think that her world is better than it actually is." (p. 199)
(1992). Learned Optimism.
"It's a disturbing idea, that depressed people see reality correctly while nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving way. As a therapist I was trained to believe that it was my job to help depressed patients both to feel happier and to see the world more clearly. I was supposed to be the agent of happiness and of truth. But maybe truth and happiness antagonize each other. Perhaps what we have considered good therapy for a depressed patient merely nurtures benign illusions, making the patient think his world is better than it actually is." (p. 108)
(1981). Stress/Unstress: How You Can Control Stress at Home and on the Job.
"The value of this Self Test for Stress Levels is that if you are getting totals of 300 or more, you are well-advised to take it easy for a year or so with any major life decisions. Not making a decision to change is an acceptable option."
(1994). The Unwritten Rules of the Game: Master Them, Shatter Them, and Break Through the Barriers to Organizational Change.
"The orthodox wisdom tells us that if we want major and rapid changes in behavior, then the only way to achieve them is for people to feel that their jobs are on the line. So, we are supposed to engineer circumstances that will create a sense of urgency—let us be honest, a sense of fear—within the body of our organizations. And with that stick we can beat our employees into a new mindset.
The established dogma is a lie. Worse, it is a self serving and dangerous lie. It has become a myth that we have all been told for so long by so many people, that we in turn have passed it on to our own colleagues and so reinforced the apparent validity and common sense of the gospel." (p. 137)
The established dogma is a lie. Worse, it is a self serving and dangerous lie. It has become a myth that we have all been told for so long by so many people, that we in turn have passed it on to our own colleagues and so reinforced the apparent validity and common sense of the gospel." (p. 137)
(Submitted). How to put more time in your life.
(2009). Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography.
"Corporate bodies do not look for their strength in ideas and in the values of the people for whom they are responsible. They try to achieve the greatest possible uniformity. They believe that in this way they hold the greatest power, offensive as well as defensive." (p. 224)
(1999). When Good Companies Do Bad Things: Responsibility and Risk in an Age of Globalization.
"From our participation in scores of conferences and conversations about corporate social responsibility, we have found that most of us bring heavy baggage to this issue in the form of deep-seated and often unquestioned assumptions." (p. 96)
(1990). Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay: The Theory of the Organizational Ideal.
"When work, the productive process, becomes display, its meaning becomes lost. Its performance as part of the organizational drama becomes the only meaning it has. Accordingly, the parts it plays in the organization's transactions with the world become irrelevant. When this happens, work loses its adaptive function and becomes mere ritual. At the same time, the rituals that serve to express the individual's identification with the organization ideal, especially those connected with rank, come to be infused with significance for the individual. They become sacred. Thus, reality and appearance trade places. The energy that once went into the production of goods and services of value to others is channelled into the dramatization of a narcissistic fantasy in which the organization's environment is merely a stage setting." (p. 61)
(1990). Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration.
"As William James wrote in Great Men and Their Environment, 'The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.'" (p. xxiii)
(2000). Headhunters Confidential.
(2003). The Blind Men and the Elephant: Mastering Project Work.
"Much of what we call 'project management' stands upon Taylor's flat-earth perspectives. When applied to repeatable manufacturing situations, his primitive notions have great utility. The same ideas fall apart when applied in more human, less mechanical contexts." (p. 7)
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